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![]() Interview with Al Breveleri: a Paradox Community Exclusive The Paradox Community: Tell us about yourself. Albert I. Breveleri: Most of the interesting things that have happened to me are so topical and esoteric that they have little meaning to anyone who was not there. For example, I was one of the many medical research system technicians who always did remember to mount a scratch monkey. TPC: Ahh... AIB: Perhaps if you just asked a few questions... TPC: May we assume this is a photo of you? AIB: That's in my office in Boston. As I recall, I had just encountered twelve errors in a single compilation when my daughter took that candid snap. TPC: When did you begin writing software? AIB: You must understand that in the early days, building and programming the machines were very closely tied together. During the years that I occasionally worked with computers, a computer engineer had to know both electronics and mathematics. By the time I took it up full time in 1968, the discipline had just split into hardware and software specialties. In 1954, for my 9th grade science project, I built several handheld games. These were the size of cigar boxes, with lights and switches on top. Each one presented a puzzle for solution -- 'Missionaries & Cannibals', 'Fox, Hen, & Corn', and one of them played 'Nim' against the user. The logic was hardwired. For my 11th grade project, I built and demonstrated a remote mobile manipulator, a little cart with a grasping arm. My control channel (Pulsed CB Carrier Wave) was too slow to allow efficient direct control in real time, so I added a ROM to hold action subroutines. Grasp, release, raise, lower, swing 45 deg left, and so forth. I had no budget at all, so I had to make all my own hardware. I learned how to wind relay electromagnets from the ARRL Handbook (the Ham Radio Operators' Bible). The ROM was a smooth copper drum with bits of adhesive tape stuck on. Tape = 0, No_Tape = 1. My first assembler was a razor blade. TPC: Where did you go to school? AIB: Yale U. (Linguistics); U. of Maryland (Japanese Area Studies); U. of California (Political History); Howard Payne College (Mathematics); U. of Michigan (Electrical Engineering); Eastern Michigan U. (Computer Science). TPC: Wow. What were you trying to become? AIB: A graduate. TPC: Who are your influences? AIB: Mostly Isaac Asimov, some Otto Binder. Later on, Mary Shelley. TPC: Fiction authors? We would have expected mathematicians and engineers. Edsger Djikstra, Niklaus Wirth... AIB: Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Alan Turing... All important figures. They showed the way to shape the dream, how to give it substance. But for me and many others, it was stories of golems and intelligent robots that brought us to the dream originally. Binder's Adam Link describes how we might begin to construct thinking tools, and Asimov's robot stories demonstrate what might happen as we continue down the path. TPC: And Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'? AIB: When to stop. TPC: Why do you hate Microsoft so? AIB: In 1982 I had a computer with 64 KILObytes of RAM that ran at 12 MEGAherz. Today I use a computer with 128 MEGAbytes of RAM that runs at 1.2 GIGAherz. The newer machine, although 2000 times larger and 100 times faster, cannot manage files or edit a document any more easily or efficiently than my 1982 model. Apparently it is too busy drawing pictures. I know I am not just exaggerating nostalgia because I still have the 1982 machine and I still use it. If software capability had improved similarly to hardware capability in the last 20 years, today I would be directing my personal computer by having an intelligent conversation with it. Instead, I am reduced to the level of a preschool toddler, pointing and grasping at brightly colored simple shapes. The blame for this infantile user interface focuses directly on Microsoft. No other institution in the history of man has been so successful at lowering public expectation. The greatest disappointment of my professional career has been the indefinite postponement of the advent of a usefully intelligent machine. TPC: That's quite a serious indictment. AIB: It's quite a serious sin. TPC: How did you decide to become a professional automation engineer? AIB: I was working in the language laboratory at the University of Michigan as one of several telephone operators. We sat in a glass booth, and the students sat in carrels with headsets and microphones. Students signaled us and asked for study tapes which we then mounted and connected for them. A couple of engineers from the computer science department studied the lab and convinced the university to automate it. They built a crosspoint switching matrix, a rack of digitally controllable cassette drives, and some custom I/O boards, and brought in a Digital PDP-8/S to run it all. The result was a language lab that was slightly more difficult to use but much more powerful. Almost twice as many students could be accommodated. Cost effective, too -- the operator staff could be laid off. This was my first experience with job loss through automation. I went home and told my wife, "I got laid off from the lab. They brought in a PDP-8/S." She said, "What's that?" I said, "Its a machine that does everything I can do, only better. It's more accurate and infinitely patient. And it never dozes off -- it can keep going forever." She said, "Where can I get one?" Check out these articles written by Al : Essay on the Paradox Community Manipulating Strings with ObjectPAL Paradox Community Newsgroups |
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